Feminist counter-geopolitics: knowledges, practices, and spaces of activism in Iranian diasporas

In the face of growing state authoritarianism, particularly targeting feminist and women’s rights activists in Iran and forcing many to leave the country, the question of whether and how feminist activism outside the country’s national border negotiates and contests political structures of gendered violence and displacement is of growing importance. This dissertation explores how knowledges, practices, and spaces of activism in Iranian diasporas across selected European and Canadian cities create alternatives to state political structures. The present research was conducted between December 2021 and June 2023 and employed different qualitative research methods, including semi-structured interviews with 39 activists, academics, artists, policymakers, and diaspora community members whose work intersects with feminism, women’s rights, and gender-based violence. I draw upon the concept of feminist counter-geopolitics, discussing what knowledges, practices, and spaces constitute them. By focusing on feminist activist experiences as the focal point of analysis, the dissertation questions the lack of attention to activism in diaspora in critical, feminist, and urban geopolitics. I examine how activist knowledge of gender and sexual-based violence changes as they cross national borders and illustrate the challenges and opportunities of translating knowledge in a transnational context. Despite significant obstacles in materializing these knowledges such as economic hardships, political kinships among activists provide important sources of material and emotional support for activists. Furthermore, I show how, despite the dominant logic of Iranian nationalism, transnational solidarities among activists in diasporas resist such exclusionary discourses in the context of the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising. I discuss how such knowledges, practices, and spaces illustrate intimate geopolitics that challenge the state-centric understanding of geopolitics, pointing toward emancipatory aspects of feminist counter-geopolitics.